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Josefina, a woman of about fifty with a shining bun of black hair pierced with a silver comb at the back of her neck and a touch of purple shadow on her eyelids, permitted herself to rest her cheek for one instant on Theodore’s shoulder. Then she lifted her head and addressed Sauzas: “Where is she, please?”
    â€œIn the bedroom,” Sauzas said.
    Theodore went with her, holding her arm, and he would have held the arm of Ignacia, her twenty-three-year-old daughter, too, but the hall was too narrow for the three of them to walk together. Ignacia followed them, and so did three or four men who had come in from the hall with Josefina. Theodore recognized only one of them, a local shopkeeper whom Lelia sometimes greeted when she passed him in the street.
    Josefina gasped, and then from her large bosom came pigeon-like sounds of repressed sobs.
    â€œThere is no need to look, Tía Josefina,” Theodore said, patting her arm. He tried to dissuade Ignacia from looking, but she stood where her mother was, on the threshold, clutching her mother’s arm. Theodore went back into the living-room. “Why can’t we put the sheet over her face?” he said both to Sauzas and the fat police officer. “Is that not allowed?”
    Somebody was kicking at the door now. “This is the press! Will you open up or shall we kick the door in?”
    â€œWe are still taking fingerprints!” Sauzas yelled back in a stentorian monotone. “You are not allowed in! So stay out and shut up! And who are all of you?” he asked the men who had come in with Josefina.
    â€œJosé Garvez, at your service,” said a tall, stout man with his hat in his hands. “I am the señorita’s liquor caterer.”
    â€œHm-m,” Sauzas said, rubbing his black moustache. “And you?”
    The next man shrugged, with embarrassment. His eyes were full of tears, and he could not speak. This was the man Theodore recognized as the baker.
    â€œSit down, all of you,” Sauzas said. “We have questions to ask.”

CHAPTER THREE
    They were still at it at seven in the morning. Only Carlos Hidalgo and three of the men had been allowed to go home. José Garvez, the liquor caterer, had been asked to stay. The press had been let in, and six or eight men had clumped through the apartment with flash-bulbs and cameras and photographed Lelia from every angle they could, in spite of Theodore’s protests and his pleas to Sauzas to call a halt. Theodore had begun to dislike Sauzas.
    Nothing of significance had been found on the roof, nor had any fingerprints been found on the drainpipe.
    One of the policemen had gone out for coffee and rolls, and they made a disorderly breakfast on Lelia’s table that was already covered with fingerprint samples, newspapers, jackets, ash-trays, even a gun among all the mess only inches from Ramón’s limp right hand. Ramón had laid his head down on the table, and whether he slept or not, nobody knew or cared.
    They asked Josefina if she knew of any enemies that Lelia might have had. No; well then, any debts that she had? Josefina knew of only one possible debt, a small one to a doctor for a slight rash she had got at Lake Pátzcuaro last September, but even that was not really a debt, because the doctor had liked her so much he had told her she did not need to pay him anything.
    This caused a burst of laughter among the police and detectives, and Josefina looked around at them with dark eyes afire with pride and resentment. “I know what you are thinking! If a woman wants to paint, what is so strange about that? If a woman has imagination? Do you think she wasn’t serious? Look at her work around you, and if that doesn’t impress you, maybe it will that she has paintings in the permanent collection at the Bellas Artes! And also that her work has been shown in New York! And if she does not want to marry, isn’t that her own concern? And if